


Broken Connection

by GhostOfDorothyStreet



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: F/M, Lauren is a human with feelings, even StrexCorp thinks human/robot relationships are weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 19:04:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1754769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostOfDorothyStreet/pseuds/GhostOfDorothyStreet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the radio station fiasco, Lauren is called into a meeting to discuss her future with the company.</p>
<p>Her problems start before she's even invited into the office...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Connection

Lauren had been sat in the waiting room for most of an hour.

47 minutes to be exact, her impatience justified the rounding up.

When she had first arrived she had been handed a complimentary cup of juice by an android secretary (the juice was orange in colour, but the taste suggested its origins lay elsewhere), but she had long since finished it and if anything it seemed to have dried her throat out even more.

She tapped her nails against her empty cup and jiggled her foot up and down, dried blood shaking loose from the heel. It was deliberate, it had to be. Heck, she’d used this technique herself enough times. They were keeping her waiting this long to throw her off her step. Well, they would have to do better than that, yes they would.

She would not allow herself to succumb to the pressure. StrexCorp was her everything, and had been since she was a young girl and had first decided she would follow in her parents’ footsteps by devoting her life to the Smiling God, and in that time she had done everything in her power to further the company’s interests, because they were her interests too. She’d made millions of dollars for StrexCorp, and climbed the corporate ladder faster than any woman who had come before her; remarkable even if she did say so herself. This company owed her - she had worked too hard for too long, and had sacrificed too much to have everything taken away from her now, just because of one mistake.

To have anything _else_ taken away from her.

She was staring up at the clock above the CEO’s door once more, when a smarmy, self-satisfied voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

“Lauren Mallard.”

She looked up, but quickly looked away with a dismissive sniff when she realised who it was. One of the men from the legal department – a branch where apparently devotion to the values of the company, and even just decent manners didn't seem to prerequisites, if her experience was anything to go on. She was fairly certain she’d encountered this particular _gentleman_ before, though she couldn't quite remember the name. Something with an R she thought. He looked like the villain from a daytime soap opera; handsome, in a cruel sort of way, with dark, oiled hair and darker eyes. He was smoking an electronic cigarette with a smug expression – puffs of smoke that smelt of cloves and burnt plastic floating up to the ceiling vents.

“So, I hear you fucked up the Night Vale project,” he said, leaning against the wall next to her chair with a smirk.

Ugh, such crude language.

Lauren straightened her skirt and refused to meet his eyes, answering in clipped tones.

“I did no such thing. We experienced a little setback with one aspect of the project, that’s all.”

“Yeah but the radio station was a pretty key ‘aspect’ wasn't it,” she felt rather than saw him shifting closer to her, leaning in close enough that his hot breath tickled her ear, “And you let their old host just waltz right in and take it. He wasn't even armed.”

She opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it, realising that saying “he had a cat” probably wasn't going to do her any favours. Besides, the insufferable man evidently wasn't quite done relishing in the sound of his own voice.

“Plus you lost an expensive bit of company tech, that’s not going to go over well. You know how much the solar batteries alone for those things cost? You could have at least dragged it back with you so the engineering guys could try and get some of the scrap value back.”

Lauren bristled

“Are you talking about Daniel?”

“Yeah, that thing, whatever it was called.”

Lauren’s paper cup crumpled as her hand clenched into a fist, and she whipped her head around to face him, eyes blazing. Her gold painted nails dug into her palms, and when she spoke it was through clenched teeth.

“ _Daniel. Was not. An it_.”

The man looked taken aback for a moment, but after a brief pause and a few seconds of taking in her expression of tightly controlled rage, he gave a soft, mocking chuckle.

“Aww,” he said, tilting his head in an expression of faux sympathy, “Missing your little love doll are you, Lauren?”

Lauren’s nostrils flared and her jaw twitched.

How _dare_ he.

This vile, insensitive man didn't have a clue what he was talking about, he didn't understand anything.  Daniel had been the best co-worker she had ever had, bio-mechanical or otherwise; he was loyal, diligent, efficient… and to have this contemptible man talk about him like that made her blood boil.

Plus… well…

The fact of the matter was, Lauren did not have many friends. Truth be told she barely had any. Her career was her life, and she had put aside things like friendship and romance so that she could better serve StrexCorp. It was a valid, and in her humble opinion commendable life choice. She rarely interacted with people outside of work, and thus the only people she really had the opportunity to connect with were her co-workers and people who, whether they liked it or not, were soon to become co-workers.

But even in those limited circles, Lauren was well aware that she was not what you would call well liked. People seemed to find her… off putting, somehow. She supposed it made sense from people who hadn't been raised in the glorious light of the Smiling God, they tended to be annoyingly resistant. As for other company employees, well, it was hardly her fault if they were threatened by her successes - envy was a flaw they should work on correcting in themselves.

Still… it got lonely. Sometimes.

She never felt lonely when she was with Daniel.

When Palmer had been being particularly appalling and she needed to complain to someone, Daniel was there with a sympathetic ear and a list of grievances of his own. Whenever she had to report back to head office via the vortex in the management office mirror, Daniel would be stood at her side, backing her up even when she had nothing to give but bad news. He always made sure her coffee was made just the way she liked it, and sat with her while she drank it, listening to her sleepy early morning able with a look in his glass eyes that was somehow more alive and attentive than she ever saw in the glazed and jaded gazes of many of her superiors. She hadn't known it was possible for an android to have a sense of humour, but somehow he managed to make her laugh when she felt down. In a real way, not a company mandated way.

And if she ever just needed someone to hold her, his arms were strong, and she could tuck her face against his chest and breathe in the clean scent of ozone and plastic.

Didn't that just strike at the heart of the matter. That was why the jokes people made about her relationship with Daniel cut so deeply; the shred of truth lying behind them.

It wasn't as if she’d never imagined threading her fingers through that silky soft synthetic hair and running her tongue over those perfect porcelain teeth. Or falling asleep to the soft purr of an electric motor inside a smooth, toned chest. She had once watched Daniel hold a man three feet off the ground by the neck during an interrogation, killing him with a single twisting motion when Lauren had extracted the information the company needed, and if she was honest with herself, the rush she had felt wasn't just one of pride or satisfaction...

She had never acted on it, of course. She respected him too much as a co-worker and valued him too much as a friend…

But now he was gone, and her heart ached in a way it never had before, and it was more than even her most positive of outlooks could take to have the connection she’d lost reduced to a cheap joke.

She stood up and pointed one sharp nailed finger at her colleague’s chest, a full scale rant bubbling up inside her chest. She was ready to scream at him about how she’d had next to no support at the radio station, how when Kevin had arrived all he’d done was undermine her at every turn, how Daniel had been her rock, and how he was worth ten times as much as any of any of the jumped up self-important idiots in the legal department, for reasons that had nothing to do with the precious metals in his circuits…

But before she could, the office door swung open, silent on its well-oiled hinges.

The female android who had welcomed her to the building, with her shiny auburn hair and painted on make-up, emerged from the orange glow of the office, her eyes locking onto Lauren’s.

“Mr Strex will see you now.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've developed this fondness for Lauren I can't quite explain, what can I say.
> 
> The legal guy is based loosely on the variations on the theme of 'DB Carlos' I've seen about the place - or at least the running theme of 'gorgeous but awful' that seems to run through a lot of his characterisations. 
> 
> Obviously not set in the same verse as my last fic.


End file.
